Grin and Tunic

It is that day of days, cherished beyond belief by any idiom-revising nun worth her pepper; it is that day of days on which we declare to the world with the gayest pride that we, the Ha’bit’ed Jew’the’ran Cat’ho’licks of the World, have POLL-e-ow; it is that day of days during which every woman of the habit, scum and nun alike, surrey down to the stone soul picnic known as Our Lady of the Polls.

Settler colonialists across the (U)nited Settler States refer to this holy day as “Election Day” but in abbeys across this colon’ized indigenous nation, the day is better known as Poll Dancing Day, and hosted graciously by Our Lady of the Polar Opposites, a congregation with a long history of inter-church polarities and binaristic festivities. By those in the k(n)ow –i.e., The Pepper of the Earth Nuns, who are truly (s)alternative of the Earth Sistrrrs– this day is (s)alternatively known as Pole Dancing Day. Allow me to hexplain.

Back in the elev-enth century, just one century past the ten-th as our ma-thematically inclined nuns like to remind me, a whole host of (approximately 100+30) Roman Catholic con-gregations were established, many of them as not-so-shabby abbeys, across (Den)m(ark), Ger(man)y, and the (U)nited Kingdom…

(I know you haven’t heard from me in a while and I don’t want to bore you with too much hiss-story, Readrrr, but I must include a little of it, though I promise to live up to my Abjection Abbey nicknames, Sistrrr Interjection and Sistrrr A-Historia.)

… These early stone soul medieval churches were spaces in which the Catholic church organized and sought refuge from the persecution of its once-Jewish now-exiled saints – Jesus, a Jew, had been claimed as a figure of the newly-assembling Catholic church, and congregations formalized this process doctrinally and, literally, through the stoning of the soul – by building stone churches as sacrosanct spaces for the sequestering of the followers of Christ. The reclamation of our Jewish Jesus, renounced, judged to be delusional, persecuted, tortured, and crucified, was the formation of what is now known as the Catholic church. It is important for nuns and others to remember this: that the Catholic church arose out of the persecutions of the saints, those who followed devoutly the teachings of Jesus and claimed him as their salvation, but that this had its own domino effect into a violent struggle for dominion.

This perhaps noble root of persecution and Jesus’ teachings of mercy were not-long-after corrupted by a culture of domination and repression that arose out of the Catholic church in its quest to establish itself, during centuries of persecution and war. Rather than be stamped out of existence, the Catholic church sought the longevity of its tradition via war, brutality, and domination – once the persecuted becoming the persecutor, forgetting the New Testament teachings of Jesus and falling back on gross exaggerations and perversions of Old Testament laws, promoting a narrative of Jew and Catholic as polar opposites, something which it is obvious that Jesus, if one gathers even remotely his teachings, would never have condoned.

Thus, with the rise of early eleventh century refuge abbeys as safer spaces came centuries of indoctrination, war, and power polarization – the church hoarding and maintaining its power and wealth and building its opulent latter-day cathedrals on the backs of peasants and slaves. One might feel inclined to sigh a troubled sigh or a few thousand troubled signs after that comically reductive characterization; I know I did. But sometimes reductivism is the cure for obscuritization, or so I’ve gathered while trying to make sense of things within my church that simply do not make sense… if that makes any sense. The church is responsible for both its reductivism and obfuscationalism, one might say, but that’s problematic, too, because, let’s face it, systems often work to obfuscate and render invisible personal responsibility.

The Catholic church (and those in power within it – i.e., The Vat) has survived so long because of its ability to deflect and obfuscate responsibility – this manifests in the moving around of priests from congregation to congregation in order to avoid having to confront issues as well as in the cloistering and impoverishing of the nuns. As I learned from my interactions with the very ugly and morally-vacant Father Danno, back when he was at the top of his sick power game and before he was consumed by his own plague in 2017, it is very hard to determine personal responsibility when institutions hide the actions of and work to protect immoral individuals, which is what The Vat did with F. Danno and which is what the church has done over the years to mask all of its improprieties, cover up its crimes, protect its perpetrators, hide its liars, and allow its evils to continue without consequence.

Where there is institutional oppression, there is the negation of individualism – those without power are dehumanized and punished while those with power are granted institutional absolution and allowed to engage in every form of hypocrisy, deceit, and harm without having to bear personal responsibility for it. Is that reductive enough for you, Readrrr, because I can get more reductive (but you will have see me after Nunification Holy Transfiguration Class in the Beatnik Beatitudes Room for the full…onslaught…of the reductivist-reductionist scoop).

Reducing The Vat and its Party of Perps down to the microcosmic size of their actual absurdly horrifying phallic appendages is appropriate; it is a balancing gesture, an edifying inversifying negation of epic proportions, one that aims to combat the enormity of their vague and mystifying egos, their collective phantom phalluses.

Sistrrr Brewster once tried to convince me that I should try to cast a Castration Spell on all the world. A few years ago, in 2015, when she proposed this, I got right on it – it was a wicked kitschen-collaboration between Our Lady of Frowns and Our Lady of Grins, and we called it The Cauldron Co-Lab. Sistrrr Frau Frown of Our Lady of Frowns and I (Sistrrr Grin Grim of Our Lady of Grins) co-lab-O-rated to conjure and cook up our best Castration Hexes and Potions, and our Cauldron Co-Lab lasted for over a year, until Sistrrr Frau Frown learned that she has a penis problem. What I mean by this is that she has an overseer, a manager, a priest-father problem – which is not just her problem; it is a problem that ALL the nuns have.

As you know, Readrrr, on the Isle of Nun (the aisle of n’one), it’s all for nun and nun for all. Father Frownmaker, priestly manager of Our Lady of Frowns, caught wind, while cutting the mustard one day, of the Cauldron Co-Lab, and he, like any dildo-shaped man stuffed in a tux of authority, would have none of it. Naturally, he destroyed all evidence of Sistrrr Frown’s contributions to the Co-Lab and he took away her cauldron and her access to Sapphic magic – well, he made her give it up “voluntarily” because The Vat addresses consent in such a way that the nuns are given imperatives but these are called “choices.” Priests like Father Frownmaker must maintain the illusion that they are “good men” who “treat women well and as equals” even while they oppress the nuns and -like the rump roasts that they are- soak in the acidic juices of their own narcissism and ignorance. A very predictable trajectory, indeed. Clearly, Father Frownmaker learned all he knows, which amounts to the myth of his own superiority, from The Vat. He has no book so he has no tricks – and all of his witless practices are predicated on a single thing: misogyny – hatred of nuns who who not cater to his authority and the policing of the nuns who blatantly defy it.

All this is to tell you, Readrrr, that because Father Frownmaker brought down the Co-Lab between Frau Frown and Grim Grin, a little accident came to pass in our kitschen. Not knowing that our Co-Lab was being infiltrated and uprooted by Father F and The Vat, Sistrrr Frown and I were fully involved with purrforming our Cauldron Co-Lab Castration Spell on the world – which would change everything for the nuns and children everywhere by preventing priests and men from ever hurting nuns and children ever again! We were just about to cast the castration spell of all castration spells when the Co-Lab was taken down by Father Frownmaker’s team of dunces, who call themselves The Penis Protection Party. The PPP. Just when we were closest to symbolically and metaphorically castrating all of them, the Penis Protection Party swamped our kitschen, confiscated whatever they were able to find, and separated Frown from Grin, rendering Operation Cuckold delayed indefinitely. That was it. The Co-Lab Kitschen was cleared out – it was as if the year of grassroots castration spelling efforts had never happened! I was placed in a nun detention camp and was told by The Penis Protection Thought Police that I would be called Sistrrr Grim – that the Grin would be removed from my name, my self-concept, and my face. I was then told that Sistrrr Frown would be forced to smile a heinous smile of deceit for the rest of her days as punishment for her transgression. No surprises. This is how The Vat operates. Classic Vat. Nothing could be more predictable.

Sistrrr Grim

Sistrrr Frau Frown

However, unlike The Vat, I am nun-predictable. Where The Vat polices, I defy – tradition and whatever else The Vat tries to police. I am a creator and a spy, and when ‘I spy the truth’, I tell it, too, no matter the consequence. It is my mission in life to defy the misogynistic rulership of The Vat in order to liberate the nuns. The nunpredictable is something that The Vat cannot fathom or control. My nunpredictability is how I have somehow been able to survive – and it has allowed me to remain a probationary nun sneaking into various abbeys for the past few years. I have lost beloved sistrrr-s along the way, but I have found a way to survive and thrive on behalf of the nuns. The nuns are my subject; liberation is my cause! But Grim is the state of things.

A Grim

is a Grim

is a Grim

is a Grim

is a Frown

A Grim + A Frown = A Grin

And so, an update. I’m in the DC Abbey of course, but there’s word on the nun street that we are moving again. Father Frownmaker will grow ass-clammy and stink with celebratory ogre odor when he hears this news – because this means that I will be moving away from the Friary Priory from which I graduated long ago and from which I have more recently been banned from even turning my pupils toward. Does that thought, about my pupils, confuse you, Readrrr? It’s in reference to Father Pupilary Fixation, who had my pupils monitored in order to file an abbey report against me, stating that I defied Rule #539274784637277777: That The Pupils of All Nuns Will Adhere to the Commands and Orders of The Vat. This rule states that any nun who turns her pupils toward the Friary Priory without The Vat’s prior(y) permission will be “locked inside the Frownmaker’s anal cavity for ten days.” I’ve been there. It ain’t pretty. Of course, I would make some sassy remark about how “Frownmaker thinks he owns the Friary Priory” but, as it turns out, he does own it. The Vat and the powers that be(full of shit) placed him in change of it, and so now Sistrrr ShayXpeare is pretty much in jail whenever she is there. As for me, I am and will always be, thank GOD, free over at DC Abbey. Sistrrr Frau Frown, like Sistrrr ShayX, is in limbo. Only time will tell what happens to the sistrrr-s. I hope Paradise Abbey is in their future, but I wouldn’t go to Las VegAss and place a hex… I mean BET… on it.

Again, Readrrr, I am going to be on the move. I cannot say where I will end up, but I am hoping that I end up at The Abbey of Gin because I have heard such lovely things about the nuns there and how they correspond so gingerly with one another, and I have also been told that the nuns there are very active in The Bar scene – I’m talking L-aw School, Readrrr. I may be nunderstating when I say that you may have had a few encounters nunder the bar but you have not yet taken your BAR EXAM, dear Readrrr. Fortunately, it’s never too late to take your bar ex (am). While I wait to find out if and when I will be moving to The Abbey of Gin, I will be taking classes to become certified in proctoring The Bar Exam. My plan is that if I end up at The Abbey of Gin, I will be able to serve up the bar exam to my nun-s. And if my nun-s fail, my nun-s will have to take the exam again. And again. And again. It will be –eventually, once, purrfected– a bar hexam hexercise in ‘The Queer Art of Failure’ because… why pass, when you can fail again and again with the Sistrrr Proctor dishing out the bar exam. Passing is never the goal, no; failing to adhere to the rules, laws, and strictures of The Vat: THAT is the goal. If I am able to get to The Abbey of Gin, I will be able to use the bar as my kitschen and below the bar as bar exam space.

Frown & Grim’s Castration Hymns

Once my new cauldron arrives, I can start concocting and the Co-Lab will up and running again. Sistrrr Frown may or may not be able to partake – I mean take part, but I am now prepared to do it all on my own. And do it all on my own, I will. Liberation is not easily won. This is a nunderground operation, and if Father Frownmaker is to eventually be railroaded, it is going to take a lot of hard work done in isolation. The nuns are experts in isolation. They have survived years in nun cells, and still kept their wits about them. The torments the nuns have endured have made them Nuns of Steel. But enough about that, I have a few more things to report.

My current abbey, the DC Abbey, will not be doomed to the fate of the Friary Priory when I move, on my journey toward The Abbey of Gin, because it’s the kind of abbey that you can keep in your bags and travel with, Mary Poppins style. No vat nor man rules over the DC Abbey. Although there was a group of priests who, a couple of years ago, tried to infiltrate and desecrate it, they passed in the process of trying to do so. Those who lived to tell about it said that they met their sorry fates at The Gates of Medusa. Approaching the gates, they held up Tiki torches and warrants that read, “Surrender DC! We have been monitoring your pupils and we are placing your pupils under arrest!” At this, all of their Tiki torches were immediately doused in tears from The Gates of Medusa.

There, at the front of the abbey, before The Gates of Medusa on The Porch of Petrification, the Tiki Torches went out, were swept out of the priests’ hands by mighty winds from another sphere, and they were raised up on high to the heavens and were again set ablaze – only this time, they blazed with lavender light and the sky was lit with the most glorious high-flying blazing wands. Did I mention that these wands BLAZED as if William Blake himself had conjured them? The transfiguration was astounding. Every torch became a wand holding up a lavender flame in the shape of a lotus.

What shone from the lavender lit sky was even more nunbelievable: a sect of witch-nuns from the DC Abbey, who dress in lavender habits, live out the poetry and art of William Blake, specialize in what they call Sapphic Gesticulations, and go by the name The Willa Blake Sistrrrs. Headmother Wilma Willa-mina Blake conducted the orchestra of the sistrrrs, and with their lavender wands, they performed the most majestic acts, unfathomable to mortal men but nunfathomable to anyone with a shred of soulful immortality in them. These lavender sprites soared with their flaming lavender batons around The Gates of Medusa. Below the priests stood stupefied and paralyzed while The Porch of Petrification sent out a host of serpents. It was then that the wand twirling transformed into broom riding. The batons of fire became brooms burning with lavender light, above the arc of The Gates of Medusa. Caught in the bewitching purple-pink waves of light, the priests had lost all control of their bodies. They were not the sort of priests to wonder how the nuns could be flying so high above them nor how they could go so low, but they did have to turn their faces from the beatific sight in order to deal with things below their belt buckles.

Three Willa Blake Sistrrrs

Almost on cue, every priest in the torchless klan looked down to his groin-region, only to discover a shocking revelation. The groin was gone! The priests no longer had groin regions! A powerful transfiguration spell had replaced their groins with serpents, or small dragons. As if it wasn’t enough that these priests had angry writhing dragons shooting out of their khakis, the dragons in their pants were all breathing Tiki-torch-fire and citronella was spurting and spilling all over the rest of their pants. In the mouths of these fire-breathing hellions were the fascist warrants, set a-flame and turning to ash, repeatedly, in a flashing spectacle, as if mimicking the book-burning rituals that The Vat has so often used to control the nuns. In their ears resounded their own voices, crying “Liar, Liar, Pants on fire,” and their tongues turned to ash as their pupils became larger and larger and larger, crushing the rest of their bodies. This was how they passed (the test at The Gate of Medusa).

Soon all that was left of the DC-destroying priests were the pupils. They had become pupils and only pupils before The Gates of Medusa. The priest-turned-pupils were pet-rified, as it turns out, though I only heard this story as it was reported to me by a Sistrrr who was there. The priests passed out of this world into the nunderworld, and the pupils of stone were left, the size of snowmen’s bottoms, and are now part of the lovely ruinous architecture for which the DC Abbey is so well know and admired. I once knew a novitiate who read all of her holy texts while sitting on a pupil of stone. She said the hardness beneath her was quite invigorating and helped her to concentrate on her studies. Okay, Readrrr, it was only me, but you must allow me to say something outlandish every once in a while in order to give myself ease in light of the plague of humorlessness that Father Frownmaker has placed on our holy region. I claim no lands; I am merely a traveling probationary nun – my only possessions are those I can keep within me, in my mind, and that is where I keep the DC Abbey and why I never have to leave it. Earlier I did mention that I was in the DC Abbey, but if you would kindly reverse that statement, you would find that it is also true that the DC Abbey is in me.

Speaking of what’s in me and what’s NOT in me… I should return to The Penis Protection Party update. The Castration Spell may not have affected all the world just yet, but fortunately it has affected Father Frownmaker, who, in all of his efforts to take down the Co-Lab, ended up taking down his own operation. He was scheduled, right around Penis Protection Investigation Time, to have his priestly weapon removed and replaced with a weapon that was (supposedly) not so hideous or impotent. He had picked out the replacement appendage and was sitting in the waiting room for his surgical procedure, smiling broadly and holding his model, The Smelly Mush-room, in his tangerine man-hands as if it were a bottle of holy wine, when all of a sudden The Mushroom vanished out of his hands. I know this because Sistrrr Frau Frown and I were spying on him from our cauldron. Just before the Co-Lab was infiltrated by The Vat’s mob, we had managed to cast our Castration Spell – but not on all the world, only on Father Frownmaker. We shrieked in ecstasy as we pickled and sauteed the voodoo meats in our cauldron. We shook with ecstasy and cried out while we cast the spell and worked our wands together, and we moaned the Latin words:

Castrate the man, quick as you can, take from him his weapon, free us from his conquests, give us back the ancient world of pleasure and peace!

In our cauldron, we saw our spell take hold of Father Frownmaker. His gloating smirk was ripped from his face quite suddenly at the very moment that his legs, wide spread, collapsed together at the knees. His hands, that he had used so many times to accompany his addiction to priest-porn, grasped endlessly and fruitlessly at what was once his weapon but was now a void. He clasped the nothingness, and he wept like a wanna be saint while we cackled and chanted together before the molten cauldron. Just then, at the moment of our success, The Vat burst in on us together in the kitschen and our castration cauldron was hacked in half by an ax, exploding the meat and juices everywhere. I blacked out from the burns caused by the exploding vat of brined meat, but when I woke up, I was in the strangest nun cell I have ever been in.

At first I thought the wallpaper was perhaps yellow – featuring flowers, but as I came to consciousness, I realized that I was not seeing the yellow wallpaper; what I was seeing was the penis wallpaper. The wallpaper on every side of the room was covered top to bottom in the horrifying repeated image of Father Frownmaker’s penis. There I was, strapped to a bed in The Penis Room, having to deal with copies of the “original” – the one that I had made vanish. These phallic phantoms surrounded me as a substitutive mockery of my Spell Against The Phallus. Father Frownmaker, I knew, was behind this. Having been symbolically castrated by two witches and having had the symbolic order of his phallic dominion nundermined was enough to make a certain region of his body frown -permanently, and so his revenge was that I should have my cliterary domicile jolted with electrodes into submission. This did, I must say, come as a shock to me. Or perhaps I came – as a shock… to it. By way of hexplanation, in between the long hours I spent staring at the penis wallpaper, I was given ECT – Electroconvulsive Clitorid/ECT/O-my Thera P – yes, every three hours, my clit- or -(s)is was treated with a shocking dose of high voltage electro thera p.

This thera p, intended to electroconvulse the cliterary imagination right out of me by sending thera p waves through me, actually produced a nunintended effect. Instead of making the cliteral stimulation of my imagination vanish as Father Frownmaker intended, the great and powrrrful ECT enlarged my cliterary imagination to the most epic of proportions. My cliteral region grew with every thera peu (tic) treat (ment), and by the time I left the The Prestige Purveyor of Penis Center, it -the original (not the copy)- was one thousand times its original size. This would have infuriated Father Frownmaker, but fortunately he has what all priests have: an inability to immaculately conceive of the clitoris! So he had no clue and was deeply gratified that I had spent ten days in The Penis Room. The Vat’s Phallic Intervention, its Penis Treatment, was a pun-ishment for the spelling sin of symbolic castration that Sistrrr Frau Frown and I COMMITTED on Father F-maker and attempted to perform on the church. It was a life-and-death experience. Despite the way in which I was able to subvert and benefit from the ECT thera p, the Penis Treatment nearly killed me. I vomited in that room for ten days straight until I was relocated. When I told the nuns at the transitional abbey what I had witnessed in The Penis Room, they all vomited with me. Together we vomited for ten more days. After we vomited for twenty three and a half hours on the tenth day, I told my sistrrrs the up side of the story – that my cliterary imagination had grown hexorbitantly, despite the phallic assault. My sistrrrs rejoiced, and skipped to the nearest mount (that would be Mt. Sistrrr) in order to praise the good Lorde for the miracle that had occurred. In the meantime, I stewed and worried about the fate of my vanished Co-Laborator.

Eventually I heard through The Grapevine, our illustrious nunderground newsletter, that Sistrrr Frownmaker suffered a far worse outcome – she was forced to reside indefinitely in The Penis House with the castrated and cuckolded Father Frownmaker. Lord knows what she had and still has to put up with on that front. Lord knows no nun would envy her; she is the pity of all the nuns, but her fate is so disturbing to them that very few will speak of her. I know nothing about her fate but what I have shared. But if you happen upon The Abbey of Frowns and you see the heinous smile of Sistrrr Frau Frown, the one that has been forced on her face as punishment for castration, you will feel in your heart the sorrowful plight of every nun who must be ruled by The Vat. But let that sorrow be accompanied by the wicked joys of probationary spy life – to which I am a living testament! Whether we frown or grin, we are on our way to The Abbey of Gin!

As we continue to survive and drag ourselves toward our unknown destiny, we must transform and transfigure the problems we face; from grim to grin, we must turn our misfortunes into fortunes, or at least try to laugh through the muddle of whatever it is that we must face. I have done this by turning Sistrrr Frau Frown’s penis problem and the problem of The Penis Protection Party into a grassroots movement. This grassroots movement is known as The Pen Is Protection Movement. Or, The PIP Movement. It is only the pen that is mighty enough to take on the problem of the PPP, The Frownmaker, and The Vat. The Pen IS protection, I have realized since becoming a probationary nun. It has been my protection, my wand, and my mighty sword.

Frown & Grim. We’re on our way in.

Tonight, at Our Lady of the Polls (and Polar Opposites), when we cast our votes for those in public office, I plan to cast a spell on the ballots – one that creates an option for the election of Sistrrr Frown to the position of Head of The Abbey of Gin. We’ll see what happens with that but don’t get your hopes up; the castrated and inflated ego of the Sir Toby Belch of Priests is still at “large”. In the meantime, as the votes are count-ed, I’ll be grinning and concocting a life-restoring grin and tunic in honor of Sistrrr Frau Frown. The nuns at DC Abbey will be doing a lot of poll dancing tonight, while we sip and grin in our tunics.

Recipe for Sistrrrs Frown & Grim’sGrin and Tunic– The Favorite Election Night Drink of The Nuns:

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Another edifying and enlightening work by Sistrrr Grim, much awaited and now duly pub-lished for all to savor. My own maternal grandmother, Ethel Nimsovich Sheldon, an actual Russian/Pole who alighted on Ellis Island in the very early 20th century, rushin’ and poll-dancing her way to the Land of Opportunity, could not have better related the hiss-story section, and of course only Sistrrr Grim is qualified and Abel to relate the spiritually transmogrifying rest.